Hollywood’s latest films cast tech leaders Musk, Altman and Zuckerberg in a dark light

With the debate raging about dangers of Big Tech and AI, Hollywood is weighing in with a negative take. The same tech titans discussing how to address the dangers of the AI they've created are now the subject of high profile films. Artificial is a scripted movie about Sam Altman, and his brief ejection from the CEO role at OpenAI, premiered at the New York Film Festival in early October ahead of the film's Christmas Day release, and the trailer has been drawing attention. I did see the movie trailer. I mean, it looks like an awful movie, but I appreciate people's creativity and I really do support that. But this is like a big thing and I get why people have anxiety. And also if they need to like project that anxiety onto someone or have like a little bit of relief and poke fun at me, it doesn't bother me. The film's path to the big screen wasn't easy. Amazon MGM was the original producer, but looked to sell the rights a few months after Amazon announced its $50 billion OpenAI partnership, a potential conflict of interest. Major studios passed on the film amid concerns about the unflattering portrayal of Altman, and it was eventually picked up by indie distributor Neon. Amazon MGM decides, well, if we put out this movie, it's essentially going to hurt our bottom line because we just put $50 billion into OpenAI. So we don't want people questioning whether or not it's a good company or a useful company or AI is something good. Then on October 9th, a pair of movies take on Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Sony is releasing The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's take on the Facebook Files Whistleblower Frances Haugen, a follow on Sorkin's Oscar winning hit The Social Network in 2010. The film follows Haugen's 2021 release of internal Facebook documents, which showed the company's knowledge of societal harm to users. It was really magical getting to see these little moments where I came in knowing some things for sure, and there were other things that we knew were known unknowns and watching the Jeff character and the Frances character figure out how to connect those pieces together. It brought back really warm memories for me. And so I felt it captured the spirit of that that time period. That same day, Alex Gibney's four hour Elon Musk documentary will be released by independent studio Bleecker Street. Early showings drew critical acclaim and criticism from Musk. Musk writing on X that the film is a "hit piece and lacks any integrity whatsoever." Elon Musk is one of the most controversial figures in the world. So I decided to make him the subject of my next film. I see these characters as being a new type of stereotype, right? So I see them as replacing the mad scientist character. I call them the capitalist tech Messiah. They innovated something, but then they decided that that makes them the smartest person in the room. They're the ones who are going to be able to solve any problem that faces the world. And now people are pushing against that. Historically, movies, both scripted and documentaries, have been cited as impacting public perception. The 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow and Vice President Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, are both cited as drawing attention to climate change. And 2013 documentary Blackfish was credited with changing perceptions of Sea world and marine mammal captivity. Movies are an incredibly persuasive medium. Stories are incredibly persuasive. Day After Tomorrow, that did more to raise awareness of climate change than anything ever had. These films come as the public